Steve Wozniak Interview

"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window"

Source: Steve Wozniak

I just read an interview with Steve Wozniak, the maker, programmer, engineer, and computer architect of the apple I and the rated best computer of all time, apple II. Steve Jobs is just the face of apple, and is really more of a douche marketer. Wozniak is the real engineer and creator of apple. I had heard of him before in a hacking history documentory, where he met captain crunch, the phone phreaker, but that's another story.

Wozniak reminds me of Tesla. He had all the knowledge required to fully understand what he was building. Everyone else was a product of assembly line style knowledge. Only dealing with a small part of the problem, but specializing in it. Wozniak lived for efficiency and made apple the success it is today. Steve Jobs was just the lucky sap evil enough to see Wozniak's potential and exploit it to his gain.

Steve Wozniak Facts

Wozniak's dream was to own a personal computer.

He loved working at hewlett packard so much he almost didn't quit his job to work full time at apple.

Steve Jobs didn't design any part of the apple, Wozniak built it all

The apple wasn't built from a garage, it was built in Wozniak's appartment or cublicle in hewlett packard

Wozniak wrote assembly code and transcribed it to binary in a notebook before implementing it

Wozniak had never programmed before. He read some programming manuals and was able to create his own compiler

Not one bug has been found in apple II from Wozniaks uber efficient transcribed-from-notebook binary code

Wozniak made breakout

Wozniak designed a way to implement super cheap color out of the blue

Wozniak implemented the floppy in just a few weeks

Wozniak made gaming possible with hi-res color, sounds, and graphics, just as a byproduct of porting breakout to the mac

Wozniak's Uber Programmer Skills

"Wozniak: I was partly hardware and partly software, but, I'll tell you, I wrote an awful lot of software by hand (I still have the copies that are handwritten) and all of that went into the Apple II. Every byte that went into the Apple II, it had so many different mathematical routines, graphics routines, computer languages, emulators of other machines, ways to slip your code in and out of an emulation mode. It had all these kinds of things and not one bug ever found. Not one bug in the hardware, not one bug in the software. And you just can't find a product like that nowadays. But, you see, I had it so intense in my head, and the reason for that was largely because it was part of me. Everything in there had to be so important to me. This computer was me. And everything had to be as perfect as could be made."

Source: Steve Wozniak

Wozniak on Moments of Genius

"I've told you two major eureka moments. One was getting color to work, with this weird scheme that I had no idea if it's going to work or not. The other was that I didn't know if I was going to get Basic to program an arcade game and it worked. In both those cases, I didn't even know if it was possible and lucked out. The floppy disk was probably the third real major eureka story."

Source: Steve Wozniak

Steve Jobs is a loser Exploiter

Wozniak is much more kind hearted. I phrase this aggressively because it looks like Jobs got the extremely easy part.

"Wozniak: We actually never talked about it even once. If there was any engineering to do, hardware or software, I did it because Steve could do stuff, but he couldn't do it as well as I. So never once did he even try. Never did he look at a circuit and suggest anything. I don't want to mess around running a company—my whole life's engineering—so he's on the phone talking to reporters, talking to stores, "Do you want us to ship you some computers, do you want to start buying them?" Talking to the dealers on the parts, ordering the parts, negotiating process, getting brochures made up or ads for magazines."

Source: Steve Wozniak

Wozniak Learned Jobs Gypped him

Jobs lied about the amount of money he was getting from Woziaks breakout game. Even though Woziak made everything, steve jobs was screwing him over. Wozniak said he was ok with it, because he was just happy being part of it.

"Livingston: So he took more money than you did, but you both worked on the project?Wozniak: Yeah, I found out 12 years later."

Source: Steve Wozniak

Wozniak Give Millions Worth of Stock to Employees

"Livingston: But you still kept enough stock for yourself to buy a house, right?Wozniak: The money I got from Apple employees, I used to buy a house. It was kind of an early state to be selling out 15% of your stock, but hey, that was a great opportunity for me. When I designed the Apple stuff, I never thought in my life I would have enough money to fly to Hawaii or make a downpayment on a house. So it was huge deal for me."